Why do people like chairman mao

Thus began what many of my generation, born in the s, well after China had launched its meteoric ascent to prosperity and global power, view as the defining catastrophe of a lifetime. My grandfather Yao suffered the most.

Yet he, as with many of his generation, seems strangely content with his lot, showing little bitterness towards his past. Grandpa Yao reads a lot of news online, and sees the internet as a potent tool to express his thoughts. It was only after I read his unpublished memoirs, compiled in a blog he set up himself, that I understood why he seems at peace with an era that left him with physical pain and emotional scars, and began to glimpse the gulf that separates my generation from his.

Grandpa Yao served as the principal of the No. Each day, he had to make three public confessions outside the school gate; he and his fellow prisoners would bend forward 90 degrees, confess, and ask for leniency. A wood board inscribed with his crimes hung around his neck by a razor-thin wire that cut into the back of his neck, leaving thin red scars.

A slip of tongue during confessions would warrant a whipping from Red Guards. For Grandpa Yao, the physical abuse was harder to take than humiliation. After Red Guards beat him in a hotel room, he saw stars and barely remained conscious. Later, when he was exiled to the countryside for hard labor, beatings were routine. His body was frequently covered in red and green bruises.

Once he was hit so hard with a spade that the handle broke. A Red Guard once even ordered the prisoners to beat each other up. Hard labor was not just physically trying but outright dangerous. Grandpa Yao worked on roofs without any protection, barely escaped a tractor accident, and toiled in a petroleum factory in the dead of winter during the Chinese New Year holiday, a time for celebration and family reunion.

What I learned was that the Cultural Revolution was only one in a long series of national tragedies that Grandpa Yao personally experienced. He was born in The next year, Manchuria fell to the Japanese. Mao said, of course, the Soviets were China's comrades. I even think that we may not have had to fight the wars in Korea and Vietnam.

But we totally ignored it. And was that just because of the McCarthyist spirit in the U. It was not just McCarthy, it was people like Dean Rusk—Secretary of State [under Presidents Kennedy and Johnson], undoubtedly a man of strong principle, a good man, but very, very ideological, and, in my view, bigoted.

In Rusk's view, a Communist was a Communist was a Communist. The differences between the Chinese and the Russians were not that important. After your first arrest from prison, how did you get involved again with Chairman Mao? How long did that process take? Four Americans plus Israel Epstein, who was stateless, met with Mao to discuss some questions of translation, which turned into a long talk about everything under the sun, and then dinner.

And then I saw him every year after that until my arrest in What were the circumstances of your second arrest? They were very different from the first, is that right? Very different. My wife and I were supporting young people who were trying to dismantle the dictatorship of the proletariat and establish a kind of town hall democracy in China. And I was making speeches in support of them all over the place.

And, well, Mao lost his sense of humor about it and put me back in prison. And you were imprisoned for how many years this time? But this was better than the first time because I knew why I was there, you know.

The first time, I had no idea what I was doing there. There was this terrible hurt, this feeling of being misunderstood. But the second time, I was not being misunderstood, so it was different. And what did you feel when Mao died? Were you relieved? Were you delighted? Were you sad? I thought his death was this terrible loss It was very strange. When Zhou Enlai died, in January that year, I was distraught. When Mao died, intellectually, I felt that this was much more important.

A much greater tragedy, this was the leader, with a capital L, who had been lost to the world. And I remember thinking to myself at the time: why is this? I think my emotional intelligence, if there is such a thing, was smarter than my intellect at that point.

You moved back to the United States in What prompted that decision? Did you think you were through with China? Was it exhaustion? No, no, not at all. When I was in the Army class at Stanford in , I had this idea of learning to be a bridge-builder between Americans and Chinese.

If I had both languages and both cultures, I could help these two peoples understand each other and to learn to work together. So by , I decided there was nothing more that I could do on the Chinese end, and I needed to go back and work from the American end.

What brought it about was my disgust at the corruption that was already rampant. I was disgusted by the fact that Deng Xiaoping, after bragging to Robert Novak about the Democracy Wall, about how the government allowed people to put up posters and express their opinion and criticize freely and so on, he shut it down once he consolidated his power.

He suppressed the Democracy Wall. We had lots of young democratic activists coming to our home every weekend and we had a kind of forum discussion, and we were living at the Friendship Hotel, where most foreign experts lived, and when they came in to the hotel compound, they had to register their names. So once Deng began suppressing democratic opinion, these people were all going to be in danger.

I imagine that when you arrived in America after 35 years, the culture shock must have been incredible. It was such fun! When I got back, the op-ed editor of the New York Times asked me to write a piece on July 4th on how it felt to come back after being away 14 years longer than Rip Van Winkle. And I did. And you know, we got a terrific welcome from the press. I was on the Today Show the day after we got back. But, then, the next day, Linda Charlton of the New York Times wrote a feature that took up the whole of page 2.

Then, everything was coming up roses. That week, I was invited to go to Washington and was formally received by the assistant Secretary of State for Asia, who was Richard Holbrooke. I spent two days talking with the guys on the China desk at the State Department. Everyone was very courteous and friendly. Nobody tried to put me on the spot or ask embarrassing questions.

And I felt right at home. I felt great. It was around this time that Deng Xiaoping made his famous assessment of Mao, saying that Mao was 70 percent correct and 30 percent incorrect. How do you feel about that? I think of it more as before and after. I think Mao was a great leader up to coming to power in , and maybe for three or four years afterwards, when they carried out these great social reforms in China.

You know, the eight-hour day, jobs for all the intellectuals, and eliminating opium, eliminating prostitution, equality before the law for women; just ordinary social reforms, which really were a transformation in the China of that day.

It started going bad around Initially, he encouraged the set up of co-ops, which worked very well. Farm production went way up. It was based on continued private ownership of the land, but the farmers helped each other to till the land. The harvest yield was distributed 60 percent in terms of how much land one had, 40 percent in terms of how much work one put in, or different proportions like that. But then, Mao got overexcited and got into his build-Rome-in-a-single-day mode.

They went from the co-ops to collective farms, so the farmers who had got their own land after centuries of hunger now lost their land to the collective. They went along, but farm production, per capita, never went up again until the Deng Xiaoping reforms, when the land was de-collectivized.

Do you think there was something personal that changed him? Did he get drunk with power, to use the cliche? I do think that. So the compromise position is to have some sort of low-key celebration here or there. Great Helmsman or ruinous dictator?

China remembers Mao, 40 years after death. Read more.